Legal/Law/Criminal Justice and Reform

‘Collision Course’: Appeals Court Tees Up Likely Supreme Court Fight By Blocking Trump From Firing Agency Leaders

(Screen Capture/CSPAN)

An appeals court on Monday ordered the temporary reinstatement of two agency leaders President Donald Trump fired, teeing up a likely challenge at the Supreme Court.

The full D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 7–4 to reverse a panel decision that allowed Trump to fire Cathy Harris of the Merit Systems Protection Board and Gwynne Wilcox of the National Labor Relations Board.

The court’s opinion cited Supreme Court precedent in two cases that “upheld removal restrictions for government officials on multimember adjudicatory boards.” The judges wrote that the government did not show it was likely to succeed in its claim that “allowing the district court’s injunctions to remain in place pending appeal is impermissible.”

Judges Neomi Rao, Gregory Katsas, Karen LeCraft Henderson and Justin Walker dissented.

Rao, a Trump appointee, wrote in a dissent that argued the majority “should have explained why the government is not likely to prevail on its argument that the injunctions exceed the court’s equitable authority.”

“Instead, the order devotes a single sentence to this question, likely because these remedies have no historical basis and put the courts on a collision course with the President over his exercise of core executive power,” she wrote.

Henderson, a George H.W. Bush appointee, wrote that the court does the parties “no favors by unnecessarily delaying Supreme Court review of this significant and surprisingly controversial aspect of Article II authority.”

“Only the Supreme Court can decide the dispute and, in my opinion, the sooner, the better,” Henderson wrote.

Hampton Dellinger, former head of the Office of Special Counsel, previously challenged Trump’s decision to fire him. However, he dropped his legal battle early March after a panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the Trump administration, writing that he was unlikely to succeed at the Supreme Court.